PajamaMan...

Thursday, May 17

Selamat Hari Telekomunikasi dan Masyarakat Bermaklumat Sedunia 2007

Today is world's Telecommunications and Information Society Day. This year's theme is Connecting the Young: the Opportunities of ICT.

Our minister in charge of among others, the ICT/telecommunications sectors in Malaysia, Dato Seri Dr Lim Kheng Yaik is among the most popular faces in the mainstream media having constantly been seen and heard criticizing the local telcos for continuously falling short in providing the best services to the end users. So I decided to check the ministry's website for any mentioning about today's world celebration on telecommunications. The website for Kementerian Tenaga, Air dan Telekomunikasi (KTAK) is nicely designed indeed, but why this: "No announcement for the time being!"?

No information about today's significance can also be found at the main website of MDeC's, the agency that overseas the development of Malaysia's Multimedia Super Corridor -- a major element of nation's ICT drivers. Oh well, MDeC perhaps have a good excuse: They are busy with on-going MSC-IAP meeting in Putrajaya.

KTAK also posted this stats at the website:

Statistic

Visitors today : 198

Hits today : 779

Visitors yesterday : 247

Hits yesterday : 1029

Total overall hits : 27184

Hmm... only ~250 people (87.5% accessed the site from Malaysia) check this website during World's Telecommunications Day? And less than 30,000 hits so far? Don't we have like 30 million inhabitants in Malaysia and 70% or so of them have mobile phones? Looks like only 1 in 1000 Malaysians (0.1%) had even cared to check on what information the Ministry is delivering via the Web medium.

Mainstream media was very much alerted of this special day though. Pajamanation Malaysia commends Utusan Malaysia, a leading Malay language newspaper for having published a decently thick section in today's print newspaper with wide coverage on telecommunications with participations by major telcos including TM (and subsidiaries: tmnet and celcom), Maxis (introducing its mobile payment service) and Digi (on its dedication on the societies).

Utusan Online however, in addition to a nice reminder banner about various celebrations including Mother's Day, Teacher's Day and Telecommunications Day, published just ONE article that talked about this day on its website. Perhaps, the corporations are still not much interested or are trusting the online medium as a credible advertising medium in comparison to the traditional newspapers that gets several million readership each day. This in contrast to a couple of fresh online advertising companies that were established just recently: NuffNang and Advertlets -- two of which are betting on explosions of net-centric advertising in Malaysia, especially through the blogging culture that are starting to bite some control in media influence. For instance, several blogs published by Malaysian authors are more popular online than mainstream newspapers like the Sun, the Malay Mail and the New Sabah Times.

As I've said it earlier, I'll say it again: Webmasters of Government-owned websites need to keep up (in being more alert, informative and transparent)! Or simply, the ministers need to dedicate more attention on updating their websites!